Up For Interpretation

Quentin Skinner and Christopher Ricks discuss evidence—and reasoning about evidence—within literary studies and the history of ideas. Quentin Skinner is Barber Beaumont Professor of the Humanities at Queen Mary, University of London, and is the author or coauthor of more than 20 books. His study, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, was named by the Times Literary Supplement as one of the hundred most inﬂuential books published since the Second World War. Christopher Ricks (below) is Warren Professor of the Humanities and codirector of the Editorial Institute at Boston University, and was professor of poetry at Oxford from 2004-2009. He has an “unrivaled critical intelligence” (Geoffrey Hill) and is “exactly the kind of critic every poet dreams of ﬁnding” (W. H. Auden, commenting on Ricks’s study of Tennyson).

Co-sponsored by the Barnard Forum on Poetry and Poetics and the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University.